Oppose Any Foe

Luke raised his hands. “Susan…”

“Luke,” she said. “I need you to do this. There’s something that didn’t get covered in the meeting. It makes all of this a lot more urgent than you might think. Kurt knows about it, I know about it, but no one else who was there knows.”

“What is it?”

She hesitated. “Luke…”

“Susan, you called me yesterday and had me fly out to Colorado on two hours’ notice. I did as you asked. Now you want me to go to Belgium. You say it’s important, but you don’t want to tell me why. You know my wife has cancer? I only mention that so you know exactly what you’re asking me to do.”

For a second, he thought he was going to tell her more, maybe tell her everything. He and his wife had split up. She was from a wealthy family, but Luke didn’t want any money from her. He just wanted to see his son on a regular basis, and Becca was threatening that. She had been gearing up for a custody battle, but now, suddenly, she had cancer. She was probably going to die. And still she wanted to fight. The whole thing had knocked Luke off his feet. He had no idea what to do or where to turn. He felt completely lost.

“Luke, I’m so sorry.”

“Thank you. It’s hard. We’ve been having a lot of problems, and now this.”

She was staring directly into his eyes. “If it helps any, I understand. My parents died when I was young. My husband seems to have checked out of our marriage, and become a recluse. I don’t even blame him. Who would want more of what they’ve been putting him through? But he’s taken my girls with him. I know what it’s like to feel alone – I guess that’s what I’m saying.”

Luke was surprised that she would open up to him like that. It made him realize how much she trusted him, and made him want to help her even more.

“Okay,” Luke said. “Then tell me why this so important.”

“There’s been a data breach at the Department of Energy. No one knows the extent of it yet, whether it was accident or was planned. No one knows anything. A lot of information is just gone, including thousands of legacy nuclear codes. No one can even say whether that matters – would they even still work? It’s going to take some time to get this sorted out, but in the meantime, the last thing we can afford is to lose a nuclear weapon.”

He sat back. He would go. With any luck, he would get over there, knock a couple of heads together, tighten up the security protocols and be back in a couple of days. In his mind’s eye, he saw Gunner in the backyard shooting baskets.

By himself.

“Okay,” Luke said. “I’ll need my team. Ed Newsam, Mark Swann. And I’m down a member. I need an intel officer to replace Trudy Wellington. Somebody good.”

Susan nodded and flashed a smile of gratitude.

“Whatever you need.”

CHAPTER EIGHT

5:15 p.m. (Eastern Daylight Time)

The Skies Above the Atlantic Ocean

“Are we ready for this, kids?”

The six-seat Learjet screamed north and east across the afternoon sky. The jet was dark blue with the Secret Service seal on the side. Behind it, the sun began to set. Luke gazed out his window to the east. It was already dark ahead of them – it was late fall, and the days were getting shorter. Far below, the ocean was vast, endless, and deep green.

Luke used his typical psych-up lingo, but it was rote. He didn’t feel it. He’d been awake too long. He had too much weighing on him. And he had taken on a job that he probably didn’t need to take.

He and his team used the front four passenger seats as their meeting area. They stowed their luggage, and their gear, in the seats at the back.

In the seat across the aisle from him sat big Ed Newsam, in khaki cargo pants, a long-sleeved T-shirt, and a light jacket. He dropped his sunglasses over his eyes, against the sun streaming in his window. When he was relaxed, as he seemed right now, all of the muscle tension would go out of Ed’s brawny, hyper-athletic body. He was like a flat tire draped across the seat. Ed was weapons and tactics, and Luke had rarely met a man more qualified – Ed himself was about as devastating a weapon as you could ask for.

Across from Luke and to the left, facing him, was Mark Swann. He was tall and thin, with long sandy hair pulled into a ponytail and fancy black-framed rectangular glasses – Calvin Klein. He stretched his long legs out into the aisle. He wore an old pair of faded jeans and a pair of big black Doc Marten combat boots. The boots made Luke smile – the man had never seen a minute of actual combat in his life, not that Luke would want him to. Swann was information systems – a wisecracking former hacker who got busted and joined the government to avoid a long prison sentence.

Swann and Newsam had come back from the Grand Canyon a couple days early – they said it wasn’t the same without Luke and Gunner.

“Babysitting some out-of-date nukes?” Swann said now. “I suppose I’m ready.”

“Worse,” Luke said. “We’re going to babysit some Belgians while they babysit some out-of-date nukes.”

“You really think that’s all there is to this, man?” Ed said.

Luke shook his head. “No. I think it’s deceptive. I think we need to keep our eyes wide open and our heads – ”

“On a swivel,” Swann said.

They were playing their roles, and that was good. Swann and Newsam were tiptoeing around the news of Becca’s cancer. Other than offering their condolences when they first climbed on board, they hadn’t said anything about it, and he didn’t blame them. It was a hard thing to talk about.

Directly across from Luke sat the newest member of the team – in fact, she wasn’t even really a member yet. This was her first time with them. The Secret Service had borrowed her from the FBI on the recommendation of her superiors. She had barely said a word since they’d boarded the plane. Luke turned his attention to her now.

He had seen her dossier. Her name was Mika Dolan. She had been born in China, but given up for adoption by her parents, who had wanted a boy. She was adopted by a couple of aging hippies who realized late in life that they wanted a child. She grew up first on the coast in far northern California, then in Marin County, just outside San Francisco. She was young – probably too young. Twenty-one years old and already a year out of MIT; 4.0 grade point average, graduated magna cum laude. Tested IQ of 169 – genius level, Albert Einstein territory.

Hobbies? She liked to surf. That part blew Luke’s mind a little – she was a tiny little person, with big round glasses, and looked like she had barely been out of the house, never mind out on the water. But apparently, her dad loved to surf the big waves along the Pacific coast, and had his daughter on a board starting at the age of three.

Mika was the science and intel officer, starting her second year at the FBI, and now on loan to Luke. Whatever Mika’s natural gifts were, she had big shoes to fill. Trudy Wellington was a lot of things – emotional, secretive, and quietly dangerous came to mind – but she had developed extensive networks in less than ten years, could access data no one else seemed to have, and was the best scenario spinner that Luke had ever worked with. Trudy was MIT, just like Mika. They had probably given him Mika for that reason.

“Well, Mika?” Luke said. “Would you like to start?”

“Okay,” she said, struggling to maintain eye contact with him. She lifted her tablet computer from the seat beside her. “I’m a little nervous. You guys might not know this, but you’re kind of legendary in my office.”

“Oh yeah?” Ed Newsam said, apparently pleased. “What do they say about us?”

Mika suppressed a smile. “They say you’re a bunch of cowboys. And they told me to try not to get killed while I’m with you.”

Ed shook his head. “They’re teasing you. Not everybody who comes with us gets killed.”

“Only about four in ten,” Swann said. “The rest live, although a high percentage of those are maimed for life. You’ll probably be okay. The Bureau has a pretty good disability package, as I recall. “

Luke smiled, but didn’t join in. Mika was very pretty, and the guys were flirting with her. He would let it go for another minute. It was a good way to break the ice, and maybe set her at ease a bit. This could be a hard-nosed group.

Luke himself felt wistful, not great. He doubted he could join in the banter if he wanted to. He had called Becca before they left. The conversation hadn’t gone well. It had barely gone at all. He had told her he was leaving.

“Where are you going?” she said.

“Belgium. Outside Brussels. There’s some concern about nuclear weapons stored on a NATO air base there. A terrorist cell is apparently going to – ”

“So you’re just going to leave?” she said.

“I’ll be gone two or three days. I’m just going to inspect the security measures in place, implement some upgrades if necessary, then go into Brussels and question a few people of interest.”

“Torture them?”